U.S. Postal Service

Local post offices have long been a part of American culture and business, but they have become increasingly expensive for the Postal Service to maintain. Nevertheless, the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 prohibits the Postal Service from closing any small post offices purely for economic reasons. In 1976, Congress formulated guidelines on whether and how the Postal Service is to close post offices. This briefing report provides information on (1) the Postal Service process for closing post offices, (2) the number of post offices closed since 1970, (3) the number of proposed post office closures appealed to the independent Postal Rate Commission and the disposition of those appeals, and (4) the attributes of affected communities for fiscal years 1995 and 1996.

GAO noted that: (1) the Postal Service has a detailed process for deciding whether to close a post office and for effecting the closure; (2) the process is to include obtaining and evaluating post office operational and community demographic information, postal service delivery options, and comments from customers who would be affected by the closure of a post office; (3) the Service has closed 3,924 post offices since 1970; (4) PRC received the first appeal of a proposed post office closure in 1978; (5) since the 1976 amendments to the Postal Reorganization Act, there have been 2,614 post office closures and 296, 11 percent, of these closures were appealed to PRC from 1978 through 1996; (6) PRC affirmed the Service's proposals on 170, 57 percent, of these appeals, determined that it lacked jurisdiction for 31, 10 percent, of these appeals, which allowed the Service to proceed as originally intended, and remanded 58, 20 percent, of these appeals to the Service, usually due to incomplete data; (7) selected attributes varied in communities where post offices were either closed or were proposed to be closed but were appealed in FY 1995 and 1996; (8) attributes of affected communities included population and number of businesses, and attributes of post offices within these communities included level of postal service, postmaster salaries, post office revenues, and annual operating costs; and (9) in most cases, the annual operating costs of the closed post offices and those proposed to be closed exceeded their postal revenues.